Analysis Of Memento

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Leonard Shelby suffers from a condition known as anterograde amnesia. This is a type of short-term memory loss that hinders a person to hold and keep new memories. Most often this type of amnesia is caused by damage to the brain. Leonard was unable to keep any his memories after the injury he sustained. There was irreparable damage to his hippocampus. The hippocampus is the part of the brain associated with the formation of new episodic memories. Episodic memories are at type of long-term memory that involved the recalling of specific events and the experiences tied to them. Anterograde amnesia basically means that a person, such as Leonard Shelby, will not be able to turn his short-term memories into long-term memories. This is why it was …show more content…

The title of the film, Memento, is very appropriately titled. Leonard has to constantly keep reminders or mementos to remind him to do important things. He carries around a Polaroid camera to take pictures of places and people to remind him of who, what, or where they are located. One example would be the pictures he carries of Teddy, who is known as John Edward Gammell, and Natalie. He write note on the back of the pictures to remember important information about them. One of Leonard’s more extreme methods to remembering includes permanently tattooing facts that he finds important facts on himself. A retrieval cue is used to access information stored in our memories with the help of a hint. As stated before Leonard cannot form new memories and use retrieval cues is the traditional way that we use them, but he use the tattoos, notes, and photos to notify himself of information that he did not want to in essence “forget”. He could not recall fresh memories on his own, but he had a great method that would allow him access to bit of information that he could …show more content…

Encoding failure can be explained as not committing a piece of information into your long-term because of lack of focus or not paying attention to the information presented. When thinking about this particular theory I am reminded of Leonard’s photos. He has a picture of everything from the sign from the motel he his residing to his car as a substitute for imbedding new memories. The decay theory is describes as the process of losing memories that are not used so they slowly leave our minds. Sometimes we are not able to recall something because we have not though about it. This theory explains why we cannot remember exactly how to solve old high school math test problems years after we graduate. We are not practicing these types of problems therefore, we cannot recall them as they simply fade away. We also have the theory of interference. This can be caused when we are not focused on something and our attention was divided. Retroactive interference can be explained as “out with the old and in with the new.” You are at a loss because you cannot remember the old password to your computer because the new password is the one you have forcibly remembered. This leaves you to forgetting the older password in the process. There is an example of this type of interference found in the film when Leonard is looking for a pen trying to focus on writing his argument with Natalie down, but he is

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